Oishik Sircar, New Queer Politics in the New India
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New Queer Politics in the New India: Notes on Failure and Stuckness in a Negative Moment Oishik Sircar I. A Dangerous Common-Sense What happens when queers become democracy’s ‘favourite minority’ championed by the capitalists, the liberals, the conservatives, and the leftists, all singing in the language of rights? It marks the inauguration (or culmination?) of a moment that is not bad but dangerous. “If everything is dangerous,” Michel Foucault wrote, “then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy, but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism.”1 The common-sense opposite of bad is good—and the good in this situation, of all of these apparently oppositional political positions becoming strange bedfellows to turn queers into rights-bearing subjects, as I will argue, is what makes this a dangerous common-sense. In this article, I both describe and critique the emerging intimacies between queer politics, the Hindu Right and neoliberalism in what I am calling the New India (and its global mutations) as a concentrated instance of the way ‘queer’—both as identity and I acknowledge that the land of the University of Melbourne on which this piece was written belongs to the Wurundjeri People of the Kulin Nation, to which their sovereignty has not been ceded. I dedicate this piece to the memory of Sharmila Rege (1964-2013), teacher extraordinaire, who taught me to appreciate both the possibilities and perils of intersectional politics. This piece has been in gestation for a long time, with earlier versions presented at the Osgoode Hall Law School, Toronto, the Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Berlin, and Centre for Policy Research, Delhi in 2010; the National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata in 2012; the Melbourne Law School (MLS) in 2010, 2012 and 2014; and at the Australia India Institute at the University of Melbourne in 2015. I am immensely grateful to Rahul Rao for his close reading and very helpful comments on the piece, and to Debolina Dutta, Dianne Otto, Joan Nestle and Claire Oppermann for our continuing conversations about this, that and everything queer. I also thank Aziza Ahmed, Ratna Kapur, Rajgopal Saikumar and Maddee Clark for agreeing to read and share their thoughts on the piece; and Dipika Jain for our collaborative editing projects on queer politics. Special thanks are due to the participants at the “Economies of Desire” and “Gender in Postcolonial Legal Orders” Pro Seminars convened by Janet Halley at Harvard Law School’s Institute for Global Law and Policy in 2011 and 2013 respectively, where many of these ideas were critiqued with care and kindness. I have learned much from the discussions at the Melbourne Queer Theory Reading Group, and the Feminist Jurisprudence Reading Group at MLS, and I thank the participants there for the keen engagement with some of the arguments developed in this piece. Without Shivangi Sud’s excellent research assistance and Ethan Stevenson’s editorial support, I could not have completed the piece. All errors and claims to judgment, facts and politics remain mine. Assistant Professor, Jindal Global Law School and Doctoral Scholar, Institute for International Law and the Humanities, Melbourne Law School. [email protected]. 1 Michel Foucault, Hubert L. Dreyfus & Paul Rabinow, Afterword: On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress, in HUBERT L. DREYFUS & PAUL RABINOW, MICHEL FOUCAULT: BEYOND STRUCTURALISM AND HERMENEUTICS, 252 (2d ed. 1983). 2 UNBOUND Vol. 11:1, 2017 discourse—is being depoliticized, individualized and responsibilized. This article is a demonstration of my hyper- and pessimistic activism that eventually leads to an acknowledgement of failure. I did not set out with this intention, but that is what it has come to—as you will see. The combination of the methods of description and critique as a particular philosophical orientation,2 is aimed at (to quote Foucault again) “mak[ing] visible precisely what is visible, that is to say, to show that which is so close, which is so immediate, which is so intimately linked to us, that because of that we do not perceive it.”3 This methodological and political orientation,4 thus, does not claim to reveal anything new—it calls for paying slow attention to that which we always look at and hear, but not necessarily always see and listen. My allusion to the newness of an India, and of queer politics, is not a discovery, but the acknowledgement of an already existing continuum’s emerging mutations. The article is written in the form of a bricolage of descriptive refractions that have animated my practices of queerfeministmarxistpostcolonial critique and activism both inside and outside the legal academy over the last decade, especially through a period where I have had to negotiate and account for the contradictions of my own politics and the complicities that have contaminated any claim to purity.5 It carries tinges of the experiential,6 but it is not written as such. Which explains my use of the expression refraction, instead of reflection. Reflection has the possibility of being a self-contained engagement—on the other hand, refraction is a project with the potential to destabilize and bend our disciplined contours of thought. Refraction doesn’t necessarily suggest a ‘moving away’ from issues at stake, but a critical engagement that confronts not one, but competing truths that give rise to the affective paradoxes of failure and stuckness.7 2 Sundhya Pahuja, Laws of Encounter: A Jurisdictional Account of International Law, 1 LONDON REV. INT’L L. 1, 63–98 (2013) (Pahuja characterizes the method as “critical redescription”). See also Anne Orford, In Praise of Description, 25 LEIDEN JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW 609, 609–25 (2012). 3 Michel Foucault, La philosophie analytique de la politique, in 3 DITS ET ÉCRITS, 1954–1988 534, 540–41 (Daniel Defert & François Ewald eds., Anne Orford trans., 1994). I also find instructive Margaret Davies’ definition of critique in this regard: “… I see the aim of “critique” to be a detailed analysis of the foundations of the way we understand the things we think about, whatever they are. Critique is useful and necessary to all forms of theory, because it exposes the assumptions we make as being not natural or neutral but, rather, associated with our particular position in the world. Critique can therefore enable us to understand, at least, that our own view is partial.” Margaret Davies, ASKING THE LAW QUESTION (3rd ed. 2008), 199. 4 I use the term ‘orientation’ as it has been theorized by Sara Ahmed. See SARA AHMED, QUEER PHENOMENOLOGY: ORIENTATIONS, OBJECTS, OTHERS (2006), 1. (“… how is it that we come to find our way in a world that acquires new shapes, depending on which way we turn. If we know where we are when we turn this way or that way, then we are orientated.”) 5 See Oishik Sircar, Of Complicity and Contamination in the Neoliberal Academy, KAFILA (Jan. 30, 2013), https://kafila.online/2013/01/30/of-complicity-and-contamination-in-the- neoliberal-academy-oishik-sircar/; See also Oishik Sircar, Doing and Undoing Feminism: A Jurisdictional Journey, L ECON. & POL. WKLY. 44 (2015). 6 I do not privilege experience, or disavow it, and remain attentive to the complicated relationship between experience and practices of theorizing. See Joan W. Scott, The Evidence of Experience, 17 CRITICAL INQUIRY 4 (1997), 773-797; Johanna Oksala, In Defense of Experience, 29 HYPATIA 2 (2013), 388-403; GOPAL GURU & SUNDAR SARUKKAI, THE CRACKED MIRROR: AN INDIAN DEBATE ON EXPERIENCE AND THEORY (2012). 7 See Oishik Sircar, Some Paradoxes of Human Rights: Fragmented Refractions in Neoliberal Times, 2 J. INDIAN L. & SOC’Y 182, 182-228 (2011, Monsoon). Vol. 11:1, 2017 SIRCAR: NEW QUEER POLITICS IN THE NEW INDIA 3 I approach this refractive practice of queerfeministmarxistpostcolonial critique and description from what Paul Cilliers would call a “modest position”8—one that acknowledges the “limitations of our understanding of this world.”9 This is not a position of relativism, but a “counter-position”10 to “arrogant self-assurance,”11 that engages with complexity without any predetermined technocratic objective of problem- solving. The article is organized as follows: first, it describes the mise-en-scène of the time and place of queer politics that I have characterized as the New India. In doing this I foreground some key places and characters. The attention to place is important because I am not offering a theoretical exegesis which is portable. What I offer might find resonances elsewhere (and I indicate these through the piece); but the political framing cannot be extrapolated unproblematically. However, I am not provincially located—both in terms of my training in common law across continents and the transnational traditions of queerfeministmarxistpostcolonial thought and practice that have inspired me.12 This is especially apparent in the ease with which I deploy ‘queer’ as politics and theory to speak of non-Western locations, even as the term carries complicated, and even violent, legacies in its journeys through the Global South.13 Second, I zoom in to closely see how the field of queer politics in India is textured by law’s flashpoints framed by the language of rights, particularly as these are sequestered by the demand surrounding the decriminalization of the colonial anti-sodomy law. I read, see and listen to a set of visual and legal texts to show how these demands reify the intimacies between queer politics, Hindu right wing nationalism, and neoliberalism. I use these reified instances to zoom out and connect with other locations where queer politics has or is taking a similar turn. I establish this connection to suggest how those troubled by these dangerous instances are related through experiences of failure rather than triumph, and that to acknowledge failure responsibly might offer a way of building “affective communities”14 of queer kinship.